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Friday, August 24, 2012

Edward Gorey House visit: Part 3

As previously mentioned, Gorey was a cat lover, and apparently his feline companions had run of the house to do as they pleased. I find it utterly charming that the House Museum included this placard near the original couch. "The dramatic and creative result of many years of many cats is the couch you see before you..."

Yep, that's what the kitties can do.

Gorey wrote The Gashleycrumb Tinies, one of his most famous books, in 1963. It is an abecedarian book featuring the death of a child for every letter of the alphabet. It's delightfully morbid. My current 2012 calendar, above my writing desk, is from the Gashleycrumb Tinies. This month I see "Q is for Quentin who sank on a mire. R is for Rhoda consumed by a fire," complete with the accompanying drawings. Behind the house is a "graveyard" for the Gashleycrumb Tinies... here we see O is for Olive run through with an awl. (Here's more about the gravestones, if you're interested.)

Here I am posing with the garden sculpture of The Doubtful Guest. What an honor!

Naturally, I had to get a little silly and try a sort-of imitation. It kind of looks like he's sniffing my head or sucking my brains out, no?

After our visit, we headed over to The Optimist Cafe for lunch - just a few blocks down the road, and a delightful lunch. They had a whole tea menu, so I indulged in a pot. It was an indulgent day, an utter delight. I hope you've enjoyed my excessive posts about the visit (and good gravy, I think this is more photos of my own self than I've ever posted, oy!) and, as I said before, I encourage anyone in the area to make time for a visit. The Gorey House is open seasonally, April through December.

Great Gorey tour ala Missive Maven! The photo of you in imitation of the Doubtful Guest would make a fun postcard, don't you think? Do you have any closeups of the alphabet picture on the fireplace mantel? Also wondering which of the rooms was his work area in this house? And lastly you mentioned a typewriter? I know he typed most of his letters in "Floating Worlds" but I couldn't spot in your pics. What a delightful day that must have been, complete with tea!

SZ, to answer your questions...1. No, I'm not so keen on printing a postcard of myself, but I'm glad you liked the picture :-)2. Nope. All the photos I took are here.3. Alas, his work area was upstairs, and we didn't get to see anything upstairs. I was bummed out about that, because the tour guide talked about how his work area was upstairs, and described it a little bit - I would have loved to have seen it!4. I mentioned the typewriter on the part 1 post. As I wrote in the paragraph just below the one envelope photo, the typewriter was in the room where photographs weren't allowed.